Tuesday, November 18, 2014

In my opinion, being organized is part of a genealogists job and I manage that in many ways. I promised that I would give the readers of my blog some ideas on how a group of people, who do not live near each other, can work collaboratively on a cemetery project.

The first thing we did was agree that we needed a place to work so Carmen created a private (by invitation only) Facebook group for us to share ideas and help each other with our research. We aren't excluding you as anyone can join. Just let me know if you would like an invite.

Brian volunteered to go drive to the Gallup Cemetery and take all of the photos. That's a huge job but he did it with gusto and flair. He has shared his photos with the group and I am backing them up to my person Flickr account. As you can imagine this takes time. While he was doing that, Carmen dug through her family genealogy records and loaned me a copy of the 1966 printed genealogy so that I can compare the information in all editions of these genealogies.

Brian has developed a gravestone numbering system and has created a gravestone map of the cemetery. Soon, I will be posting this with a link so you can look at it as we go along.

We discovered that some gravestones are broken or too shady, so together we have added to our collection of photos.

I am starting an Excel spreadsheet of the basic information and I have been developing a cemetery card system. I will be taking photo of that as I go along.

In case you don't know about project based learning in a genealogy setting, I have explained it some time ago and it is linked here.